Logos Protos


Electric Music, Tape (8 track ADAT tape, at Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory, The Hague), voices on tape, 4 pantomimes (in the outfits of Elvis Presley, the Pope, a major-general and a banker)

UA: 2/12/2000, Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Ensemble Perlon (Terza Prattica Festival)

CD: “His Masters Noise” BVHAAST CD 06/0701

LOGOS PROTOS (2000) is the last piece of a triptych (Nomos Protos, 1986; Kronos Protos, 1995). The title refers to the very first, all-determining word.

The piece is based on fragments from the novel Siebenkäs by Jean Paul (1763-1825), who two centuries ago already expressed the nightmare of contemporary life: “Resurrected, Jesus addresses the world about the non-existence of God”.

This nightmare is about breaking open tombs from which the dead – especially dead children – arise with torn chests and without any eyes. They go to a church where the resurrected Jesus appears in the vaulting. The children ask Jesus a penetrating question: “Is there a God?” Jesus answers that he has traveled through the entire universe, to its furthest corners, and that he could nowhere find a God. There is no God and mankind is only a whim of nature based on pure chance.

In his novel Jean Paul compares contemporary society (then still far in the future) to music full of dissonance.

I have worked the most significant passages from Jean Paul’s text into an electric composition in which the material is entirely based on realistic but strongly transformed sounds. The sources of the sounds are nature, the human world and technology; they appear in that order.

The form of LOGOS PROTOS is closely related to the text, where bit by bit all religious and metaphysical illusions are destroyed, until ultimately nothing more than a lonely human individual remains, devoid of all frills and left with one last question:

“Is what is next to me still a human being?” The scenic portrayal is limited to the presentation of four human prototypes whose most important ‘modern’ characteristic is their icy frigidity: a priest, an entertainment-star, a soldier and a banker, – the terrorists of modern metaphysics.